I was shocked to see four entries for Lochboisdale and six for Stronsay Waltz which claimed arrangements of those two tunes - which I know are both still in copyright.

"Stronsay Waltz" is a slightly slowed-down version of the 6/8 march "The Scottish Horse", which is a few decades older.

I find it amusing when some players start getting all officious about certain tunes- the Calliope Jig is "really" called Calliope House, and "must" be played in A because the composer intended it that way

It was written in E. On the fiddle, it definitely sounds better that way. For other instruments there isn't that difference.

what appears to be coming across from comments to this thread at the moment is that, once you move away from songs to instrumental music, there seems to be a more relaxed approach to the concept of 'tradition'. Interesting. I recall hearing "Yesterday" played as a guitar instrumental at a few folk sessions when it first appeared around 1965. And the other one sometimes played in the clubs was MacCartney's "Blackbird" - mind you, a little riff nicked from a Bach BourrÈe can go a long way... 300 years perhaps, and we'll hear them at sessions?

Working musicians' notebooks are a window into past behaviour. 300 years ago, Scottish fiddlers and flute players were transcribing Highland reels into the same books as Lowland songs, tunes by Corelli, and tunes by people in the grey area between folk and art music like Carolan and Charles Maclean.

So, it looks as if their has been, and still is, a living tradition of tunes some of which have no known author, played within a particular community and passed on without written music, for hundreds of years.

In Britain, probably not. Again, working musicians' notebooks tell the story. A significant proportion of practicing instrumentalists had them. Much of their contents was copied from print sources like Aird, and they were so widely used that anybody playing for a dance would have been able to find someone local with a paper copy of any tune they wanted to play for it. They may have got a few supplementary tips saying not to be play it quite as written, but the basic tunes didn't depend on an exclusively oral tradition to survive and spread.

What's the story with old musicians' manuscripts in Ireland? Is something like the Village Music Project possible there? Or has it been done long ago?